Barbara O'Brien is the author of Rethinking Religion: Finding a Place for Religion in a Modern, Tolerant, Progressive, Peaceful and Science-affirming World, available at Amazon. She is the resident expert on Buddhism at About.com and also blogs at The Mahablog.

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This weekend the International
Conference on Men’s Issues was held in a VFW hall in St.
Clair Shores, Michigan. It was originally going to be at the
DoubleTree Hilton in Detroit, but some feminist groups protested
and the terrorized He-Men chose to move the venue, adding that… Read full post »

An editorial in the New York Times, “The
Myth of Obama’s Weakness,” says the "audacious
decision to attack the Bin Laden compound in Pakistan has
demolished the notion that he cannot make tough decisions or cares
primarily about the nation’s image abroad."

The
whizzes at RedState posted an exclusive video that was supposed
to justify the manhandling of Lauren Valle at the Paul-Conway
debate this week. But in fact, if you watch it closely, you can see
Lauren Vale running away from a man who appears to be Mike Pezzano,
the guy who… Read full post »

We may be selling the original Manichaeism short — I
wouldn’t know — but the word has come to refer to a way
of looking at the world through a two-color prism that sorts
everything and everyone into two piles — good/bad,
right/wrong, light/dark, us/them. You might remember th

Yesterday I saw a blurb that defined the clash over climate
change as a struggle between science and ignorance. But these days
what major issue isn’t essentially a struggle between
knowledge and ignorance? Whether you’re talking about climate
change, health care reform, national security

This is a follow up to the recent “Malpractice
Reform for (Doctors Who Are) Dummies” post. Over the
weekend I found more ammunition for my argument that physicians are
misinformed if they think tort reform is essential to reducing
their malpractice premium costs. Further, while the high

When I meet someone who says he was in lower Manhattan on
September 11, I apply a little test. Yes, I was watching from
an office building on West 17th Street, I say. A
high-rise. We had a clear view. Where were you, exactly?

The AMA’s slow and begrudged support to the contrary, many
physicians seem ambivalent about health care reform. They are
holding out for federal tort reform, which they believe is key to
lowering their malpractice insurance costs.

The claim — that refuses to die
no matter how many times it’s disproved — is that
there can be no health care reform without tort reform. I’m
going to flip that around and ask whether some people are reversing
means and ends. Instead of thinking of tort reform as a

It is extraordinary — just extraordinary — that
George Will should write a column urging American and NATO
withdrawal from Afghanistan without mentioning the events of Sept.
11, 2001. It is as though Walter Lippman

The Right did its best to whip up fake outrage over the way
Democrats conducted themselves at Senator Edward Kennedy’s
funeral. It was politicized, see, because people who spoke
at the funeral brought up the Senator's long work toward health
care reform. And righties just can't stand politiciz

First, you should know that the FreedomWorks special ops unit
that kidnapped invited me to an undisclosed
location for discussion has treated me very well. I must say, that
sodium pentathol stuff does clear your mind! And now that
I’ve agreed to tell the truth about Obamacare, my hosts
have

I reached menopause just as the first warnings about dangerous
side effects of hormone replacement therapy (HRT) were trickling
into news stories. So I never took HRT. The hot flashes were a
nuisance, but I figured they wouldn’t kill me. Eventually
they faded away.

Sometime this week, the last scraps of asbestos and other toxic
substances will
be removed from the Deutsche Bank building on 130 Liberty
Street, lower Manhattan, according to officials. And by early 2010,
the ruined building will be entirely demolished, they say.